


a cold hard season

by arbitrarily



Category: Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-22
Updated: 2011-08-22
Packaged: 2017-10-22 22:25:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/243252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>they get a little older – time does that, time, as a rule, offers room for things like reconsideration and doubt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a cold hard season

and you rode the maypole of dance hall legs  
and galloped to another’s embrace  
and i bit the flowers from your wrist corsage

( _widow’s grove_ , tom waits)

 

 

A man’s memory is anything but reliable.

What Laurie has honestly come to believe is this: Jo had not understood him that day in the wood.

She had not kissed him back either, a fact that nags at him hungrily in his more unguarded moments.

As time wears on, he begins to believe he experiences less of those.

Perhaps. Or perhaps with age Laurie has become a better liar.

 

 

 

“Teddy, please don’t ask me.”

Try as he might, that part is never altered.

 

 

 

After, he had made little promises to himself - dramatic little things, like “I would go to hell and back to find what it is I am searching for, shake the devil down for some piece of mind, for your hand in mine.” 

When it came to the maudlin thoughts such as these, he found that he thought in terms of music more often than not. Unheard of by anyone save for him, there would twist long phrases without words that would crest and just as smoothly fall.

He took to pen and ink much like Jo – whereas her fingers would come to eke out words to her decided tune, Laurie flattened his against the keys.

 

 

 

It is in France that he convinces himself of this potentially unfounded truth: there is room in his heart for him to love another.

Amy is merely a specter of the girl he once knew and remembered – that same girl with the tousled gold curls and twin expressions of either girlish delight or selfish resentment.

He finds her in Paris and he thinks of the sound ice makes when it cracks, of the look of panic that froze Jo’s features.

He thinks of the way his hand had fit so well and so firmly around Jo’s waist when he spun her around the ice and how at the same time, the biting cold and their breath visible in the dim afternoon sun, he had thought of a future built upon more of the same: his hand, her waist, their bodies tight against each other.

He greets Amy and his own smile has gone cold.

 

 

 

“I did not come here to forget you,” he commits to the page one afternoon.

He balls the paper up before the ink dries and sighs.

 

 

  
Laurie kisses Amy. Amy kisses back, her small figure draped in black.

When Laurie had kissed Jo, the birds and the flowers and the trees of the wood had mocked. Her mouth was wet but immobile against his; he kisses her sister and she earnestly kisses him back.

(Jo sits alone in Orchard House. Beth has been dead for two days and her piano sits silent.

Jo sits silent, too).

 

 

 

He loathes the idea that Jo must experience the various ugliness life has to offer without him there beside her, as both witness and support.

It is not that Laurie imagines that she needs him. Not his Jo.

It is just there are times, many times, when he would like for her to.

(Without realizing it, Laurie waits for post from Jo – her familiar, angular, near masculine scrawl –  _Teddy come home come back I need you._

He does not expend the mental currency to hope for three other words – three words, even smaller and all the more delicate.

He imparts the words upon another March).

 

 

 

It happens like this:

Amy returns from Paris. Amy returns with Laurie.

 

 

 

Wild imagination aside, Jo is unsure what scenario her unspoken anticipation had to offer.

It was not this.

Jo had not expected Amy as the bride.

To be fair and honest, she is unsure what she had expected at all.

When Amy corners Jo later, asks her in a quiet but coy voice if she minds terribly, Jo smiles.

There is no other answer save for, “Of course not.”

What’s done is done.

(If Amy had feared Jo would mind terribly, there was the post, there were other ways Jo could have been alerted before the nuptials, before the words stuck in her throat as Laurie introduced her to his new wife.

There had been flour streaked across Jo’s face. In retrospect it makes her cringe.)

 

 

 

Time and change itself share the distinct similarity in that one is apt not to notice their passage.

Winter passes on to spring; leaves shade first from a newborn, tentative yellow to a verdant, ripe green that envelopes all of Concord. From there, they wilt and crinkle in browns and reds along the foot-worn trails and front stoops of houses. The cold will beckon and the snow will fall, and once the drifts begin to melt the cycle will begin anew – yellows to greens to reds.

What happens is this: they get a little older, they burn a little colder.

The empty space for regrets widens that much more; Jo fights against the temptation to stare too long into that yawning gap.

 

 

 

She is a happy woman, fortified in her husband’s enduring love and faith. 

She is still Jo March underneath it all and try as she might there still exist sharp-edged facets that will never dull or fade away.

If in idle moments Jo was to think of her boy Teddy, nothing could be found remiss and wanting in that.

Sometimes, though, she disguises her thoughts. Even from herself.

 

 

 

Jo writes chronologically. She starts at the beginning and finishes at the end and the space in between she happens upon is what would be referred to as the middle of the story.

She plows ahead with her words; “I’m not one to wish to turn back and re-imagine and edit what has already been set down,” she tells her husband. He beams by the fire and reads poetry in his native tongue; there is no sound but his mouth shapes the foreign syllables and words.

“That’s a lie,” Laurie would have said if it had been him, sitting next to the old hearth, a dog-eared book in hand.

But Jo does not do that. She does not think that at all.

She is not one to revise past events. She will not shape them into something else, plagued as her thought might become.

The weight upon her conscience would be even greater.

(Laurie stretches his legs out by the fire and the grin that flashes across his face is both full-blown and knowing.

“My Jo,” he says. “My Jo.)

 

 

 

There are other reasons to decline a marriage proposal other than the obvious lack of reciprocity of love and affection.

There is fear.

There is denial.

Jo imagines there must be others but only these two spring to mind.

 

 

 

Her first Christmas as a married woman, and Jo kisses a man who is not her husband.

“I have read novels about women like this,” she thinks, and her mouth tastes of him, of the brandy he had been sipping by the fire and she fights against a shiver down her spine. Laurie still has a hand anchored to her waist; he breathes evenly, deep.

“I have written stories about women like this,” she does not say.

In the darkened room, she stares at Laurie’s face, at the small lines that have begun to crop around his eyes, his jaw. For a moment she lights on Meg and Sally Moffat’s coming out, on how ashamed Meg had felt for behaving in a realm so far out of character and her believed moral fiber.

Jo does not feel that, not in the empty study, not with Laurie, her palm still pressed against his chest.

She wonders if that means it is wrong, or just that right.

He kisses her again, his mouth wet, tongue insistent against hers.

His hand falls heavy low on her hip.

 

 

 

It is so simple the way he says it now: I will love you until I die.

“Teddy, please don’t ask me,” Jo had said.

That was a long time ago.

 

 

 

A love dismissed is not necessarily a love lost.

There is that lesson, Laurie might say.

The thing to remember though is that Laurie is no longer a man to speak such as this. A man has his pride, his grandfather had once said.

A man has his pride and a woman has her virtue. 

He had not known at the time what sort of sum the two when joined created, and now, a man, pride intact, with his woman, still virtuous, he still has yet to understand the point.

Laurie has his pride, but he also knows that a love dismissed is not necessarily a love lost.

He would like to tell his wife’s sister this. He would like to tell her, and watch the blush rise to the apples of her cheeks. Watch her. Rattle her in her cage a little.

How is that for virtue? he might wish to sneer.

But Laurie is not that man and Jo is not that woman.

Laurie sits in his study and reads books on law while Jo writes novels, their shared history ghosting over souls with other names chapter after chapter.

“You never asked my side of the story, now did you?” he wrote once, shortly after the title  _Little Women_  had shown up with a bow and a small note in his front foyer. 

He never sent the letter.

“ _If you can forgive me this –_ “ Jo had written in her note.

He will only read the book once.

 

 

 

 _fin._


End file.
